He’d be the POTUS to end all POTUSes, since Jared and Ivanka will presumably rule jointly under some other rubric. That’s once Dad’s embalmed body is on permanent display under glass in Red-State Square, or the former National Mall.   

Trump first joked or “joked” about the possibility at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser over a year ago, right after heaping praise on Xi’s dismantling of any term limits on his own presidency. “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” he said, winning laughter and applause.

More recently, he retweeted Jerry Falwell Jr.’s claim that he deserves a two-year extension of his current term as a form of “reparations” for the two he’s been robbed of by the Robert Mueller investigation. But that’s a relatively modest fantasy compared to Trump joshing (he’s such a cutup) about keeping an award he’d just been given by the Wounded Warrior Project in the Oval Office “at least for 10 or 14 years,” adding, “but we would cause bedlam if I said that, so we’ll say six.”

Just last week, he tried out another spin on the same idea at his latest MAGA rally in Florida, this time while venting about the news media “fakers” who nail him whenever he exaggerates. “In six years, they’re all going to be out of business, folks. If we want to drive them crazy, I’ll say in 10 years. They’ll go crazy. ‘See, he is a despot. He is a despot.’”

Then he repeated his ideal timetable: “10 or 14.” That adds up to four full terms in the White House, meaning that Trump will only exit office at age 87—if then. Maybe we should feel reassured that he’s still pretending he’ll have to face re-election every four years to stay in power instead of just commanding ICE to abolish the Democratic party.

Even so, he’s only kidding, right? Not if you understand Trump-speak. Anyone who keeps on finding the identical fantasy amusing over and over is also telling us that he finds it enticing. Every self-respecting Trumpologist has long since lost count of how often Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or some other hack, has had to reframe some outrageous speculative remark by her boss as yet another example of misunderstood presidential humor.

One problem with that spin is that his infinite jests are never especially funny. Another, of course, is that he’s cunningly introduced them just the same into our rancid political atmosphere as possibilities, however hypothetical or superficially absurd. That suddenly makes them seem no longer totally beyond the pale.

In fact, “everything that he says is a trial balloon—even his jokes are trial balloons,” NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who specializes in studying authoritarian rulers, told The Washington Post. “But if you look at what he jokes about, it’s always things like this—it’s the extension of his rights, it’s the infringement of liberties. And authoritarians are continually testing the boundaries to see what they can get away with.”

Practically speaking, Trump has already gotten away with a lot. A great deal of it has escaped the public’s attention because he’s gotten us too riveted by his showbiz to keep track of its real-world consequences. A long article by Jonathan Stevenson in The New York Review of Books does an excellent job of laying out how declaring a phony national emergency to deal with policing the Mexican border has blurred the old demarcation line that prohibits presidents from deploying U.S. armed forces in a homeland law-enforcement capacity. Where that might end could give “mission creep” a new meaning.

Meanwhile, ICE has gone from being a “reasonably disciplined agency” to a rogue force that operates without any real oversight or accountability. Along with the Border Patrol’s, ICE’s rank and file is vociferously pro-Trump, and no wonder; he’s the guy who turned them loose to put the “Guess” back in Gestapo. If Trump ever dreams of going full-on despot and creating his own political police—and you can bet the idea doesn’t exactly horrify him—he’s got the makings of one ready to hand.

Even minus the gaudy Starship Troopers uniforms that Ivanka would undoubtedly win the contract to design, it’s already clear that he thinks of the U.S. government as an instrument meant to operate exclusively to Donald Trump’s benefit. All that outdated prattle about dedicated public servants who work for the country, the Constitution, and the American people no matter who’s president is so much gibberish in Trumpworld.

Recently, he’s gotten much more overt about wanting the Department of Justice to start functioning as his personal goon squad, from investigating Joe Biden and—yes—Hillary Clinton to confirming that its own agents spied illegally on his 2016 campaign to kick-start the Democrats’ “witch hunt” against him. He also wants the DoJ to prosecute former Secretary of State John Kerry for violating the Logan Act, a law Trump had undoubtedly never heard of until somebody dug it out of mothballs for him.

Trashing his own former reputation as a more or less principled man, Trump’s latest Attorney General, William P. Barr, seems totally willing to bend over forward—sorry, we meant backward—to oblige his boss. It’s already a cliché to say that the new A.G. comports himself like Trump’s defense lawyer, not the nation’s top cop. Don’t be surprised if his evasiveness, duplicity and stonewalling over the Mueller report is only a preview of coming attractions, because his DoJ sure isn’t likely to respect any Congressional subpoenas or contempt citations directed at members of the executive branch, including Barr himself. Making Jeff Sessions look like a paragon of flinty integrity wouldn’t be our own choice for how to appear in the history books, but what do we know?

Down the road, Trump clearly expects the Supreme Court to exhibit the same fealty, thanks to the openly partisan right-wing majority cemented by his appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. The only wild card is Chief Justice John Roberts, because Roberts actually does care how he’ll look in the history books—a rarity among so-called conservatives nowadays. But it’ll be game over if Trump gets to name a replacement for one of the court’s liberals before his first term is up, which is why a GoFundMe devoted to keeping Ruth Bader Ginsburg healthy could raise millions of dollars overnight if things came to that.

Lower courts have ruled against Trump’s initiatives time and again up to now, starting with his original Muslim ban. But that balance could be changing, thanks to his and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s alacrity in packing the benches with right-wing extremists who can presumably be relied on to be loyal to Trumpworld’s priorities. If the 2020 election ends up in a legal miasma that gives federal judges—and, ultimately, SCOTUS—an excuse to jump in, the odds that the issue will be settled fairly and responsibly are dwindling by the day.

One reason the 2020 election’s outcome could easily end up vulnerable to a judicial intervention that leaves 2000’s Bush v. Gore looking like kid stuff is that Trump is very likely to go ballistic if the results aren’t favorable to him. Back in February, his former lawyer Michael Cohen told the House Oversight Committee of his fear that “there will never be a peaceful transition of power” if Trump loses next year.

Granted, Cohen’s expertise with crystal balls is mostly confined to either growing or shrinking a pair of them as the occasion requires. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who’s no Chicken Little by nature, is also bracing for the possibility that Trump will refuse to leave office voluntarily unless his margin of defeat is too crushing to be challenged. “We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” she told The New York Times last month.

It’s not even impossible that Trump will either seize on or just manufacture some sort of foreign or domestic crisis to throw a monkey wrench into the election process. After 9/11, none other than Rudolph Giuliani tried to do just that, demanding a three-month extension of his mayoral term to deal with the attack’s aftermath. In defiance of term limits, he threatened to run again if all three major candidates to replace him didn’t agree to the delay.

In that case, New York’s state legislature put the kibosh on his nutso scheme. But would the U.S. Senate’s Republicans do the same if Trump borrowed from Giuliani’s playbook? Would SCOTUS, for that matter? Because Trump is Trump, absolutely nothing is off the table, and we’d be better off not pretending otherwise. After all, clinging to the White House for as long as possible by any means necessary is his one surefire hedge against being indicted, as he almost certainly will be for one crime or another—by New York State, if not the Feds—once the Oval Office isn’t his ultimate firewall.

Ridiculously far-fetched, you say? Not really. If Americans have learned one lesson since he rode down that escalator at Trump Tower nearly four years ago to announce his candidacy, it’s that there’s no longer any such thing as an implausible scenario in our political life. What’s far-fetched is imagining Trump accepting defeat and returning to private life to plan his all-gold presidential library after passively watching Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Pete Buttigieg take the oath in front of a bigger inaugural crowd than his was. Even wanting to be president for life could be only the tip of the iceberg, because Trump’s ultimate aspirational model—and Jared, and Ivanka’s—isn’t Kim Jong-Un or Putin. It’s the House of Saud.